Posts Tagged ‘funding’

Leaders of 15 top Big Green environmental groups are paid more than $300,000 in annual compensation, according to an Examiner analysis of the organizations’ most recent IRS Form 990 tax returns.

At $584,232, the Conservation Fund’s Richard L. Erdmann, the group’s executive vice president and general counsel, is the most highly paid official among the 15 organizations examined. Erdman received $438,954 in salary and $145,278 in “other compensation,” according to the fund’s return. All figures cited are taken from 2008 returns unless otherwise noted.

The second most highly compensated is Environmental Defense Fund President Frederic Krupp, who receives total compensation of $496,174, including $446,072 in salary and $50,102 in other compensation.

Close behind Krupp among Big Green environmental movement executives is World Wildlife Fund President Carter Roberts, who was paid $486,394, including a salary of $439,327 and other compensation of $47,067.

The median salary among all 15 of the highest-paid Big Green environmental officials is $261,295, while the median total compensation for the 15 is $308,465. (more…)

The median salary among all 15 of the highest-paid Big Green environmental officials (the nonprofits like Environmental Defense Fund, Nature Conservancy, etc.) is $261,295, while the median total compensation for the 15 is $308,465….

You know — these are the leaders of the groups who constantly wail that nature is under unrelenting assault by Big Oil, whose money and influence they say is the Goliath to the enviros’ David.

Meanwhile:

[Big Green] opposition nonprofits analyzed by The Examiner included the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Concerned Women for America, Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Tax Reform, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Citizens Against Government Waste, National Taxpayers Union, and the American Conservative Union.

An Examiner analysis found a median salary of $228,703 among the opposition groups, or nearly $33,000 less than that received by the environmental executives. The gap is even wider when media total compensation figures are compared, with top executives at environmental opponents receiving $254,605, or nearly $54,000 less than the top 15 environmental executives. (more…)

We are not thinking the wrong thoughts, we just don’t know how to think the right thoughts.

In a just published paper for SPPI, We Are Thinking The Wrong Thoughts, I highlighted the intensive efforts by government funded research groups, to categorise and explain away the non-acceptance by ever-increasing numbers of the general public, of the IPCC and UN creed on global warming, It is obviously very galling to some of the Lead Authors at IPCC that not everyone, including very many scientists more qualified than they, accepts their modelling claims.

One such IPCC Lead Author is Professor Andy Pitman, from the University of New South Wales, who has joined forces with psychologist Ben Newell from the School of Psychology, also at the University of New South Wales, in producing a paper which suggests that “Insights from the psychology of judgment and decision making might help the climate community communicate global warming science to an often skeptical public.”

You would of course expect a paper on cognition to appear in a psychology journal. Wrong! Failure of cognitive thinking. It actually appears in the journal of the American Meteorological Society with the title “The Psychology of Global Warming – Improving the Fit between the Science and the Message”

The leaking of the East Anglia “Climategate” e-mails and data last November shattered the appearance of a scientific consensus on supposed “man-made global warming” and provided a disturbing insight into the corruption of the scientific process as it relates to the “man-made global warming” hypothesis. The spectacle of scientists stonewalling freedom of information requests, destroying records, hiding unwelcome results, colluding to keep dissenting viewpoints out of scholarly journals, and even suppressing their own acknowledged doubts — all of this made it perfectly clear that other interests were at stake than the pure pursuit of knowledge. The centrality of the quest for funding in the e-mail exchanges made it equally clear that for the scientists in question, money, unsurprisingly, was first and foremost among those interests. (more…)

Considering how Exxon, Chevron, and others have climbed on the CO2 reduction bandwagon, believers of man-caused global warming may have realized the “skeptic scientists corrupted by big oil” idea is rapidly losing credibility. Skeptic populations are increasing; somebody must be funding them. (more…)

A reader review posted on the Amazon website of the useful book A Primer on CO2 and Climate, second edition by American academic Howard C. Hayden says “someone recommended this book to me. So I went here, and all I see are glowing reviews. Yet, if you check up on this retired professor, he sits on an organisation called CFACT that has received over $US472,000 ($A532,000) from ExxonMobil over that last seven years. CFACT has been critical of government regulation on many issues, including the o-zone layer, mercury emissions, global warming, toxic waste and the use of pesticides. While buying this $US14.95 book helps supplement his income, it is pretty clear who is funding his retirement.”

This comment is typical of the dirt flung by activists at anyone who dares to challenge their dearly held belief that the science on human induced global warming is rock solid. Also, like all such accusations, the amounts produced with a flourish by the global warming activists contradicts the case they are trying to make, that big energy is bankrolling scepticism. The amount revealed works out to a little more than just $US67,000 a year, which is trivial even in Australian terms for a lobbying organisation of any size let alone in America where CFACT operates, and never mind that it’s been given to the organisation with which Hayden happens to be associated rather than directly to the scientist. The amount just looks large to activists.(more…)

Below is a partial list of funders for the Climatic Research Unit of climategate fame. These organizations and companies funded Phil Jones and the CRU division of the “hockey stick team.” Notice all the major international oil companies, leftist NGOs and self-interested governments — none of which climate alarmists mention when questioning funding of climate realists.

“This list is not fully exhaustive, but we would like to acknowledge the support of the following funders (in alphabetical order):” (more…)

In what passes for debate about climate change one of the most tiresome allegations is that skeptics are lavishly funded by big oil. As a result of this funding, so the argument goes, the public has been confused by those who’ll say anything in exchange for a paycheck.

“Follow the money” we’re told and you’ll discover that climate skeptics are irredeemably tainted. Ergo nothing they say can be trusted. Ergo their concerns, questions, and objections should be dismissed out of hand.

It’s therefore amusing that the current oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is now drawing attention to the close relationship between climate change activists and BP – aka British Petroleum, an entity for which the descriptor “big oil” was surely invented.According to the Washington Post the green group Nature Conservancy – which encourages ordinary citizens to personally pledge to fight climate change – “has accepted nearly $10 million in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations over the years.” (more…)

As for stimulus jobs—whether “saved” or “created”—we thought readers might be interested to know whose employment they are sustaining. More than $2.4 million is stimulating the career of none other than Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann.

Mr. Mann is the creator of the famous hockey stick graph, which purported to show some 900 years of minor temperature fluctuations, followed by a spike in temperatures over the past century. His work, which became a short-term sensation when seized upon by Al Gore, was later discredited. Mr. Mann made the climate spotlight again last year as a central player in the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which showed climatologists massaging data, squelching opposing views, and hiding their work from the public. (more…)